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Early Age of Discovery
The '''Early Age of Discovery' lasted from about 1453 AD until 1517 AD. It began with the era of Portuguese voyages sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator that heralded the European Age of Discovery. It then ended on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 AD, when Martin Luthar published his Ninety-five Theses. By 1517, most of the basic characteristics of modern Europe were falling into place. With the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the completion of the Reconquista, modern Spain could be said to have emerged. As had the core of Russia, with decline of two-centuries of Mongol dominance under Ivan the Great. England emerged from the turmoil of the War of the Roses, with a powerful new dynasty, the Tudors. Meanwhile, explorations by the Portuguese and Spanish began the Age of Discovery, leading to the sea passage round Africa to the East, to European sightings of the Americas, and to Magellan's magnificent circumnavigation of the globe. The artistic flower of the Renaissance burst into full bloom with the unparalleled talents of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The arrival of the printing press introduced the era of mass communication, which would permanent altered the structure of society. Christianity and missionary zeal also play an important role, and there are obvious parallels between the Crusades and the Age of Discovery. Just as the Crusaders slaughtered Muslims in Jerusalem in 1099 with clear consciences because their opponents were infidels, so the Europeans would use their mastery of the globe to conquer, enslave, exploit, and dominate economically, all to bring Christian enlightenment to the pagans. European expansion in the next phase of world history would be conscious and directed as it had never been before. Greed for land and gold was not new, nor was the religious zeal which inspired them also. What was new was a growing confidence derived from knowledge and success. Europeans stood in 1500 at the beginning of an age in which their energy and confidence would grow seemingly without limit. The world did not come to them, they went out to it and took it. History Europe in the late 1400s When speaking of the Early Middle Ages (1453-1756) in Europe, we are really drawing attention to a process by which a new world emerged from the agrarian, tradition-dominated, and confined Christendom of the Middle Ages. Reconsidering the crises of Europe in the 14th-century - the infamous Black Death, the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe, or devastating effects of larger-scale warfare - does not reveal a story of decline or decay, but rather the remarkable resilience of European society that enabled it to rapidly recover. The process of growth and economic development indeed paused in the 14th century, but by the late-15th-century Europe was poised on the edge of growth population which has gone on ever since. The increase was relatively slow and steady until the mid-18th-century, after which the increase accelerated. If not for the fact that millions of Europeans went overseas especially in the late 19th-century, quite likely her population would have been closer to 400 million in 1900. The explanation lies as always in further improvements in agricultural productivity. Agriculture was slowly changed by increasing orientation towards markets. A large population in the area meant a market and therefore intensive cultivation. Important techniques which raised the productivity of land were already in use in a few places by 1453. The Low Countries, the most densely populated region in northern Europe, was already leaders in agricultural practices that nearly eliminated fallow land. Another area was the Po valley, where some new crops were introduced to Europe larder from Asia; for example rice appeared in the 15th century. The Age of Discovery would result in even more additions to the European larder. The so-called Columbian Exchange, the widespread transfer of plants and animals, between the Americas and the Old World, completely remade the world. Before 1492, no European had ever seen a tomatoes, corn (maize), potato, chocolate, peanut, avocado, blueberry, or tobacco, while native Americans had never seen a horse, pig or cow; indeed no Indian had ever seen a chilli, a New World food. Just an acre and a half of potato cultivation could feed the average family for a years, and it eventually became an important staple of the diet in Europe. While corn may not feature prominently in European diets, it has been the most important food for animals for centuries. Better nutrition led to longer and healthier lives for more people in Europe and worldwide, contributing to population growth. Of course, the Columbian Exchange also circulated a wide variety of diseases, none of which indigenous Americans had been exposed to. Old World diseases such as smallpox had a devastating effect when introduced into the Americas. It has been estimated that upwards of 80% percent of the native population died in epidemics within the first 150 years following 1492. Europeans did suffer from tropical diseases too, but were aided by the New World discovery of quinine, an effective treatment for malaria. One result was that a Europe of about 70 million inhabitants in 1500, two centuries later had almost doubled to 125 million. The process of urbanization continued too, though slowly at first. During the Early Modern Age, Paris almost tripled in size from 200,000 to 550,000, while London shot ahead from 100,000 to over 600,000. Another novelty of the 16th-century was the appearance of slums. Naples, one of Europe’s largest cities but also one of its poorest, was a prototype of the swollen, semi-parasitic cities that would to be found in many countries following the Industrial Revolution. By the late-15th century, a quickening of tempo in the commercial sector was already discernible; Europe was regaining something like the commercial vigour first displayed in the 13th century. She could draw on an enormous pool of skilled craftsmen, already used to investigating new techniques, and extending them into new fields. Two centuries of artillery had brought mining and metallurgy to a high level. A late medieval craze for mechanical toys at markets and fairs throughout Europe was an important feature of the age; perhaps as important as the work of Renaissance scholars. Eastern Asia's long leadership in engineering skills was being surpassed by Europe. Early industrial areas grew around the centres of long-established manufactures, such as textiles or brewing or mining. Old trades created concentrations of supporting industry. All of Europe was growing more commercialised, more used to the idea of using money to make money, and supplying itself with the apparatus of modern capitalism. One result was that the medieval commercial pre-eminence of northern Italy and the Flemish Low Countries slowly disappeared, until it began to be clear that England and the Dutch Netherlands were the new manufacturing and banking leaders. The picture of overall expansion and growth obviously requires some qualification. Neither population nor urbanisation growth was evenly spread, and local famines were sporadic checks. A bad harvest if accentuated by warfare, and the diseases that followed armies about, could quickly devastate an area; of which there were a great deal. Social changes were not so marked in these centuries as they were to become. By the late-18th-century, Europe was still soaked in the assumptions of aristocracy. Feudal lordship was less and less a social reality, but masked by the persistence of old forms. Some landlords benefited, while others had to sell out. For the lower classes the effects were sometimes harsh, especially as landlords increasingly enclosed common land and the peasant grazier starved. Even at the end of the period, a peasant child had only a 25% chance of surviving infancy, the average life expectancy was 22 years, and few lived beyond their 40s; not much different from someone living in the Roman Empire in the 2nd-cntury AD. There did emerge a class of prosperous farmers, merchants, and urban professionals, but in most placed the questioning of traditional social status had barely begun, except in the more open societies of England and the Dutch Low Countries. There had not yet come the mass industrial jobs, that would provide the first great force to prise apart the unquestioned certainties of traditional life. .]] One continuing trend of these three centuries was that kings were able for a variety of reasons to increase their power over those they ruled. Nearly everywhere ruler raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles. This was often because they could keep up large armies and arm them with the most effective weapons. With the appearance of artillery during the Hundred Years' War, great men could no longer brave the challenges of their rulers from behind the walls of their castles. By 1500 many rulers well on the way to exercising a monopoly of the use of armed force within their realms. They were arguing more about the borders with neighbours too, and this marked a change in emphasis of kingship from a claim over vassals known to the king, to the control of a certain area. Over such territories, royal power was increasingly exercised directly through officials, paid for by taxes. There was no sudden transition to the modern bureaucratic state; it took centuries. It was helped by a widespread wish to have done with feudal anarchy, and accept central government if it would guarantee order and peace. There was increasingly no sphere of life regarded as absolutely inaccessible to the law. This was an enormous break from the past. To the medieval mind the idea that there were not fundamental privileges that would always be respected, or laws of god which could never be contravened by man, would have been unthinkable. The idea of Christendom too, though still important in emotional ways, effectively lost any political reality in this period, even before the Protestant Reformation. Christian rulers threatened by the Muslim Ottoman Turks might appeal to their fellow Christians for aid, but the reality was that Christian states would follow their own interest and ally with the infidel if necessary. This was the era of Realpolitik, of the conscious subordination of principle and honour to rational calculation of the interests of the state. This was also an era when governments went to war over quarrels in which questions of trade were important, perhaps even paramount. Dynastic Union of Spain A wedding in 1469 proved of profound significance in the history of Spain. Isabella of Castile married Ferdinand of Aragon (1474-1516). Her husband argued that her crown should be his, but Castilian nobles supported Isabella, so it was agreed that the young couple shall rule jointly. The pious Isabel and the Machiavellian Fernando became an unbeatable team, known as the Catholic Monarchs, a title bestowed on the couple by the Pope. Castile and Aragon remained for the moment separate kingdoms, with their own laws and governments, but the shared rule meant that most of Spain was now finally reunited; Basque Navarre would be annexed in 1515. Spain was not quite a single kingdom, but the seven-century long ideal of ''Reconquista'' could finally be completed. Although the Catholic Monarchs could call on all the military resources of the two powerful kingdoms, the mountains of the Sierra Nevada surrounding Muslim Granada made it difficult to conquer by military means alone. While an arduous decade-long campaign captured outlying Muslim strongholds, the Spanish also meddle in internal feuds among the ruling family. Their chosen prince, Boabdil, prevailed in 1490, as a vassal of Spain with the promise of limited independence for Granada. It seemed as if the war was over, but neither party kept to their agreement, and the eight-month siege of the city of Granada began in April 1491. The reason for the long siege was not so much a determined defence, but rather the disorder and tumult that gripped the city and protracted negotiations; the city capitulated on 2 January 1492. The terms of the surrender were fairly generous the remaining Muslims with promises of respect for their religion, culture and property, but these were honoured for only a few years. In this campaign general Gonzalo Fernández (d. 1515), the “Great Captain,” introduced the tactics, training, and organisation that made Spanish infantry and artillery a dominant force in Europe for more than a hundred years. With its large Muslim and Jewish populations, medieval Spain had been the most religiously tolerant country in Europe; by the 13th-century, it was the only Christian kingdoms that did not restrict Jews from certain professions. Much of the development of Spanish literature, art, architecture, and commercial vigour stemmed from this fact. The Jews served Spain particularly well, providing an active commercial class, and an educated elite for administrative posts; the predominantly Jewish school of cartography on Majorca made many important contributions towards making the European Age of Discover possible. By the late-14th-century however, the status of the Jews in Spain began to change in the wake of the Black Death; Jews had aleady been expelled from England in 1278, as well as from France in 1306 and 1394. Popular hostility reached a climax in 1391, with anti-semitic violence and massacres in almost major city in Spain. Over the next century, half of the estimated 300,000 Spanish Jews converted to Christianity. However, the Marranos or “new Christians” as they were known became a highly controversial group throughout Spain, with their continued commercial success provoking jealousy and accusations of continuing the rites of Judaism in secret behind a Catholic facade. In 1478, the Pope allowed Ferdinand and Isabella to establish a branch of the Inquisition in Spain to investigate such claims; the institution dated back to early-13th-century efforts to hunt-out heretical sect, such as in the wake of the Albigensian Crusade. Even the Pope soon had misgivings, and Spanish Church authorities often refused to cooperate, but to no avail; the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) thus operated entirely under the control of the crown. The first Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, set the tone for the Spanish Inquisition; his dedication to the task became legendary. The "lucky" sinner had their property confiscated; a convenient fund-raiser for the ongoing wars against Muslim Granada. If you were unlucky, you underwent unimaginable tortures before a public burning at the stake. During Torquemada's 15 years, about 2,000 people were sent to their deaths. In 1492 Torquemada persuaded Isabel and Fernando to order the expulsion from their territories of all Jews who refused Christian baptism; up to 100,000 left for other Mediterranean destinations, predominantly Muslim north Africa, and a talented Spanish middle class was decimated. Over the following decades, Muslims faced the same fate. The introduction of forced mass conversion in former Granada sparked a Muslim rebellion in 1500, and afterwards Muslims were ordered to convert to Christianity or leave. Most, around 300, 000, underwent Christian baptism and stayed, becoming known as Moriscos; many had little option since the official policy was now to charge exorbitant fees for safe passage overseas. But there were never enough Arabic-speaking priests, their conversion was barely skin deep, and never assimilated; the Moriscos were expelled between 1609 and 1614; these expulsion anticipated what would later be called "ethnic cleansing" to create a homogeneous society. Identifying fraudulent conversions and other heretics would keep inquisitors busy for the next 300 years, with the Inquisition eventually spreading throughout Latin America, and the other Spanish colonies. By the end of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, modern Spain could be said to have emerged. The Iberian Peninsula was brought under one rule for the first time since Visigothic days, except for Portugal which had long been independent. A religious severity had been introduced that made Christian Spain the most intolerant country in Europe, and later the secular spearhead of the Counter-Reformation. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, discovered the Americas and claimed the rich, unspoiled territory for Spain, shifting the entire centre of European gravity from the Mediterranean to the coast of the Atlantic. Ferdinand meanwhile enmeshed Spain in the dynastic struggles of Europe by marrying his children into the royal families of Portugal, the Habsburg Dynasty, and England; the liaison with England went wrong when Catherine of Aragón was cast aside by Henry VIII. The balance of power within Europe was drastically shifted by the marriage into the powerful Habsburg family. Against all probabilities, the early deaths of two children left the third, Princess Joanna, heir to the Spanish crown. Her husband, Philip of Habsburg, was heir to Burgundy and the Low Countries. From 1517, their son Charles V Habsburg succeeded to the Habsburg lands in Austria, and was elected Holy Roman Emperor. He thus ruled all of Spain, the Low Countries, Austria, several Italian states, Germany, and part of France – more of Europe than anyone since the 9th-century – plus the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Age of Discovery In 1400, men could still think of the world as made up of three continents - Europe, Asia and Africa - that all meet around the shores of the Mediterranean; the most westerly region known to Europeans were the Canary Islands. A huge revolution lay just ahead, which for ever swept away such views; the Age of Discovery (1419-1779). One explanation for it was technological advancements in shipbuilding and long-range navigation that became available from the 14th-century onwards. Spurred no doubt by a more complex maritime, there were two crucial changes in ship design; the stern-post rudder, and a gradual process of improving rigging. The carrack was developed in the 14th-century, a ship carrying up to three masts, with mixed sails: the main-mast and fore-mast carried multiple square-rigged sails; and the mizzen-mast had a big lateen-sail. A major advance was the introduction of the caravel in the mid-15th century, carrying newly invented fore-and-aft jib sails attached to a bowsprit. These made vessels much more maneuverable; they could be sailed much closer-to-the-wind than any other in operation in Europe at the time. Once these innovations were absorbed, the design of ships was continually refined but remained essentially unchanged until the coming of steam propulsion. Admiral Nelson would have found Columbus’s ship a perfectly comprehensible machine, albeit small and cramped. Crucial navigational developments had also taken place. The compass and nautical charts came into common use in the Mediterranean in the 13th-century, and the next two centuries saw the birth of modern geography. With the translation movement of ancient Greek texts into Latin, a copy of Ptolemy’s account of world geography became widely available after 1410, and proved a great stimulus for better map-making; it had had been virtually forgotten in the West for a thousand years. Spurred by the thought of commercial prizes, some princes began to sponsored cartography schools, especially in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula; a group of predominantly Jewish scholars flourished on Majorca until expelled in 1492. Foremost among these princes was the brother of the King of Portugal, Henry the Navigator '(d. 1460). A familiar explanation for the Age of Discovery is that the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 severely limited European trade along the Silk Road. More accurately, Venetian trade agreements with the Ottomans increasingly monopolised the combined land-sea routes to the Orient, which had anyway become more dangerous with the breakup of the Mongol Empire. But Europe's maritime adventures owed as much to unique geopolitical setting of Portugal. Portugal had a long Atlantic coastline, but was land-locked by Spain, and effectively locked-out of the busy Mediterranean trade by the dominance of the Italian maritime-republics. Almost inevitably, it seems, they were bound to push out into the Atlantic. Moreover, the idea of securing the Iberian Peninsula by attacking the Muslims on their own soil in north Africa was a natural extension of the [[Era of the Normans#The Spanish Reconquest|''Reconquista]]. In 1415, the Portuguese conquered Ceuta, the Muslim port of across the strait from Gibraltar, with the aim of profiting from the lucrative trans-Saharan trade route. The third-son of the king of Portugal was one of the first to fight his way into the city; known to history as Henry the Navigator. This seems to be the event that fired Prince Henry's enthusiasm for exploration down Africa's coasts, to know how far south Muslim territories extended, hoping to bypass them and tap directly into West African gold trade by sea. He came to characterise the spirit of a new age; a combination of crusading zeal, lust for glory, land and gold, and pure love of discovery. He sponsored voyages, collecting a 20% tax on any profits, and established a seafaring school at Sagres, in the extreme southwest of Portugal, where he gathered a team of navigators, mapmakers, astronomers, shipbuilders and instrument-makers. The first discoveries of significance were two island groups in the Atlantic, the Madeira Islands in 1419 and Azores in 1427. Colonization proceeded rapidly and soon rich land was brought into cultivation mainly for sugar cane; sugar was being exported to Europe from 1445. The productivity of the islands soon came to depend on another result of Henry's later expeditions; the African slaves; Portugal enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the Atlantic slave trade for over a century. With the discovery of America in 1492, the Azores became an invaluable landfall almost midway across the Atlantic, while the pattern successfully piloted by the Portuguese would be transferred to the West Indies. Meanwhile, expedition after expedition was sent forth throughout the 15th century to explore down the '''coast of Africa. The sheer difficulty faced by these captains is well suggested by the long struggle to get round Cape Bojador; a promontory only about 150 miles south of the Canaries. Prince Henry sent out at least fourteen voyages to attempt the feat before one at last succeeded in 1434; sailors feared it would be impossible to return once it was passed. Once this psychological barrier had been crossed, progress was quicker. The first permanent trading post overseas was established in 1445 on the island of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania, starting the chain of Portuguese settlements along the coast. By the death of Henry the Navigator in 1460, Portuguese ships had pushed as far as present-day Sierra Leone. In the generation after Henry, his countrymen reached present-day Ghana in 1471, and discovered a thriving gold trade between the natives and visiting Muslim merchants. In 1482, they discovered the Congo River, by now clearly searching for a sea route around the southern shores of Africa to the Indian Ocean; an act of faith since the view that had existed since Ptolemy was that the Indian Ocean was landlocked. In 1488, Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias (d. 1500) rounded the Cape of Good Hope in such bad weather that he did not see it, but satisfied himself that the coast was now trending north-eastward. On the return voyage, he did sight the Cape, and erected a pillar to claim the territory for the king of Portugal. These pillars, and this claim, had by now become the standard practice of the Portuguese expeditions whenever new territory was reached. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama (d. 1524) achieved the real prize of reaching India. His squadron of four shops left Lisbon in July 1497, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in November, and began making his way up the uncharted eastern coast of Africa. In early March of 1498, da Gama and his crew dropped their anchors in the port of Mozambique, where they were excited to find Arab vessels in the harbour. This was the most southerly port of the long-established India Ocean trade network, and it was relatively easy to hire a pilot with knowledge of the prevailing winds and currents to guide the expedition the rest of the way. In May 1498, Calicut was safely reached, an important trading centre in south-western India. Da Gama was welcomed by the local Hindu ruler at first, and the crew ended up staying for three months, but relations soon became stained. Muslim merchants considered the Christians their rivals, da Gama's goods failed to impress compared with the valuable goods traded there, and the Hindu ruler must surely have wondered why his guest was so keen to erect a stone pillar. In August, da Gama began his journey back to Portugal, ignoring the local knowledge of monsoon winds. On the outgoing journey, the fleet crossed the Indian Ocean in only 23 days; now on the return trip, at the mercy of successive calms and storms, took 132 days. Before the African coast was reached many of the crew die of scurvy; a first glimpse of one of the problems of ocean travel. De Gama arrived back in Lisbon until September 1499, more than a full year after he'd left India. Only 54 of the original 170 member crew survived the magnificent voyage. The Portuguese moved quickly and aggressively to monopolize trade in the Indian Ocean to the detriment of Muslim merchants. The aim was to cornered the profitable trade in eastern spices, previously dominated by Venice via the overland route through India, the Muslim world, and then across the Mediterranean. By establishing the sea route round the Cape, Portugal could undercut the Venetian trade with its profusion of middlemen. In East Africa, small Islamic states along the coast forced to become allies of Portugal on humiliating terms or face direct control or outright destruction. There were also attacks on Muslim shipping, most notoriously on a Pilgrim ship returning from Mecca to Calicut; 400 men, women and children were burned to death with the ship. The problem with such an combative strategy was that it risked turning the native Indians against them, but fortunately for the Portuguese they were able to pit Hindus against Muslims or other Hindus. After bombarding Calicut in retaliation for destroying their first trading-post, the Portuguese went to rival port Kochi where they established and fortified the first permanent European settlement in India in 1503. Attacks against Muslims throughout the Indian Ocean by Portuguese soon provoked a response from the most powerful Islamic state in the region; Mamluk Egypt. Egypt built a fleet of modern warships at the port of Suez on the Red Sea, in alliance with the Ottoman Turks and Indian princes, and secretly financed by the Venetians. The decisive Portuguese victory at the resulting Battle of Diu (February 1509), was one of the most important battles in world naval history, for it marked the beginning of European hegemony over the India Ocean that would last 500 years, until the rise of Japan in the early 20th-century. By this time, another sailor, Christopher Columbus (d. 1506), had crossed the Atlantic to look for Asia. The Spanish had not stood idly by as the Portuguese explored the Atlantic coast of Africa. They had long claimed the Canary Islands, which Portugal agreed to recognise in the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479) in exchange for exclusive rights of navigating, conquering and trading south of the islands. In Santa Fe, a royal encampment from which the Siege of Granada (1492) was conducted, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella debated whether to accept a proposal put to them by a visionary Genoese explorer, Christopher Columbus. For eight years Columbus had been pestering European courts, particularly those of Portugal and Spain, to sponsor him in an undertaking which had become an obsession. The Portuguese explorers had had notable success in their attempts to sail east round Africa, but Columbus had become convinced that he can achieve the same more easily by sailing west. Contrary to the popular myth, no educated men thought that the Earth was flat. It had long been the accepted view, deriving from Ptolemy, that nothing but sea separated Europe from India and China round the back of a spherical world. As far back as the 3rd-century, Eratosthenes (d. 194 BC) had correctly calculated the circumference of the Earth, confirmed by Posidonius (d. 51 BC) and by Arabic astronomer Alfraganus (d. 1050) using different methods. During the 15th century the notion had developed that the unseen distance between the Canary Islands and China by sea was much small, because of the archaic units-of-distance used by the Greeks, and confusion between the Arabic mile and shorter Roman mile. Columbus argued that the distance was as small as 2300 miles, rather than the vastly larger true figure of 12,500 miles. The Portuguese court rejected his argument. The conquest of Granada allowed Spain, for the first time, to concentrate major resources on overseas exploration, and after a year of deliberation, the Catholic Monarchs agrees to fund Columbus' bold jounrey. Once agreement was reached, after so many years, Columbus and his partners, the Pinzón brothers, moved quickly to prepare vessels for the great adventure. On 3 August 1492, a little fleet of three ships set sail from Spanish port of Palos; the'' Niña,'' Pinta ''and ''Santa Maria. They spent three-weeks loading stores in the Canaries, and then sailed west into the unknown. During the next month there were several sightings of coast that turned out to be illusions, until at last a look-out spied real land. On 12 October 1492, after 36 days of sailing westward across the Atlantic, Columbus steps ashore on an island in the Bahama Islands. He claiming the place for Spain, naming it San Salvador; It is not known which island they landed on, though one of the Bahamas now bears the name San Salvador. These were not the first Europeans to reach the Americas, the Viking Leif Erikson holds that claim, but they were the first to record their achievement. Columbus believed that he had reached the East Indies (Indonesia and the Philippine), and therefore described the timid but friendly natives as "Indians"; an inaccuracy that has remained attached to the aboriginal peoples of the whole American continent. By the same token this region became known to Europe as the West Indies. They spent almost three months visiting various islands until reaching the large island of Cuba, which Columbus convinced himself to be Japan, a place of marvels described by Marco Polo. Beyond Cuba, the Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked on Haiti. Columbus decided to leave here a small colony of forty men, with food and ammunition for a year, while he sailed back to Spain with news of his achievement. He reached Spain on 15 March 1493, where Ferdinand and Isabella received him with every honour. This however proved the high point of Columbus' career. Three more voyages to America lay ahead of him, but from now on misfortune increasingly blighted his endeavours, often deriving from his own inadequacy as a colonial administrator. On the second voyage five months later, he found the colonists on Haiti had been massacred by the natives. It wasn't until his third voyage that Columbus actually reached the mainland, exploring the Orinoco River in modern-day Venezuela. Unfortunately conditions at the new colony on Haiti deteriorated to near-mutiny, and the Spanish crown stripped him of his title as governor and dragged him back to Spain in chains. He went on what would be his last voyage in 1502, but it proved an unmitigated disaster of storms, mutinies, and rotting ships’ timbers. Columbus died probably of severe arthritis following an infection in May 1506, still believing he had discovered a shorter route to Asia, although by then many already had doubts. In 1494 the name "New World" was first applied to what had been found in the western hemisphere, unmistakably opening a new era of European history. Columbus not only discovered it, but made crossing the Atlantic seem just an arduous journey, rather than a terrifying step into the unknown. The Spanish were initially disappointed with his discovery, which offered small amounts of gold and little trade. It was not until the continent itself was explored that Spain found what it had sought; the vast wealth of the Aztec and Inca. Shortly after Columbus's return from the Americas, the two enterprising Atlantic nations recognised the benefit of coming to an understanding about their respective interests in a world of widening horizons. An agreement was reached in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, at a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. The line had a profound significance which no one as yet appreciated; it slices through the entire eastern part of South America. Six years later in April 1500, a Portuguese captain, Pedro Álvares Cabral (d. 1520), en route for Calicut in India, took a wide westerly curving route through the Atlantic to avoid the calms of the Guinea coast, and chanced upon the coast of Brazil, deemed to be part of the Portuguese share of the globe, through the accident of the Tordesillas Line. Thus Brazil, the largest territory of South America, became the only part not to be in the Spanish Empire, and the only country today with Portuguese rather than Spanish as its national language. In 1501-02, Amerigo Vespucci (d. 1512), a Florentine navigator in Portuguese service, was taked with exploring the South American coast, with the aim of finding a way round the landmass to Asia. His lively and embellished description of the voyages from modern-day Suriname to beyond the mouth of the River Plate in Argentine were published, and became widely known in Europe, along with his conclusion that this immensely long coast was not that of Asia, but a separate continent of its own. When German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published a world map in 1507, collating the mass of new information accrued from these western voyages, he proposed that the newly found land be named after Amerigo, using a version of his name that looked good in Latin; America. Vespucci's theory was effectively confirmed by Vasco Núñez de Balboa (d. 1519). In 1510, he established a Spanish colony at Santa María la Antigua (modern-day Panama), the first permanent European settlement on the mainland, and the forth Spanish colony in the Americas after Haiti (1496), Puerto Rico (1508) and Jamaica (1509). The local Indians spoke of another vast sea not far away to the west, rich in gold. An expedition was mounted in a mood of urgency, with the news conveyed to the Spanish king; a move which proves his undoing. The Spanish king was so impressed that he planned a much more ambitious colony with a new governor. News of the impending arrival of his replacement prompted Balboa to rapid action, to secure any possible glory for himself. In September 1513, Balboa trekked westwards with a force of 180 Spaniards, a native guide, and 800 Indians, and four weeks later saw the Pacific Ocean spread out before him. The new governor, furious at being upstaged by a much younger upstart, arrested Balboa on a trumped up charges and had him beheaded. As if this were not injustice enough, the poet Keats in literature's most famous reference to the discovery of the Pacific, credits Balboa's great achievement to Cortez. The culmination of the early phased of the Age of Discovery was the magnificent achievement of Ferdinand Magellan '''(d. 1521); the first complete circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan learned his craft voyaging to and around the Indian Ocean in the service of his native Portugal, but in 1516 offered his services to Spain, after being passed over for promotion. The wealth of the Spice Islands (the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia), then the single world source of nutmeg and cloves, was of great interest to Spain. They had first been reached by Portuguese navigators sailing east in 1512, but Magellan held a theory that the Spice Islands could be reached by sailing westwards, and may be less than half way round the globe from the Tordesillas line, thus belonged to Spain; he was almost right, they are just 5° more than half way round the globe. Just 27 years after Columbus’s landfall in the Bahamas in September 1519, Magellan sailed from Spain with a fleet of five ships. Reaching Rio de Janeiro in December, he spent the next ten-months searching for a channel through to the Pacific, sighted seven years earlier by Balboa. The broad estuary of the River Plate was explored in vain, and it was not until October 1520 that he began to explore the straits further south that now bear his name. By then, his fleet had been reduced to three ships; one had been wrecked, and another deserted and sailed home. One month later, they sailed out into the unknown ocean. It seemed calm enough, so Magellan named it the Pacific Ocean, Spanish for "peaceful sea". The crossing proved a nightmarish test of endurance, taking 99-days without replenishment of food or water, before exhausted crew made landfall on the island of Guam in March 1521. The next landfall was the Philippine Archipelago, where they remained for over month, with Magellan eager to convert the locals to Christianity. One local ruler agreed to accept the new religion, in return for his help in fighting their neighbours on the island of Mactan. Expecting an easy fight, Magellan himself led the attack but the Spaniards were overpowered and Magellan was killed. He was already west and slightly north of his destination of the Moluka Islands, and has achieved the hardest part of the undertaking. But the glory of completing the circumnavigation of the globe fell to one of his officers, Juan Sebastian del Cano, who finally reached Spain in September 1522, on the only surviving of five ship, with just 17 of the original crew of 265. With this achievement, the prologue to the European Age of Discovery can be considered over. About a century of exploration had changed the shape of the world and the course of history. In 1569, the renowned Dutch cartographer, Gerardus Mercator (1594), made his familiar projection of the map of the world devised as if it were an unrolled cylinder. Yet the pacific still had surprises in store, not least Australia which was only discovered in 1770. From this time the nations with access to the Atlantic would have opportunities denied to the land-locked powers of central Europe and the Mediterranean. In the first place this meant Spain and Portugal, but they would soon be joined and surpassed by France, the Dutch Netherlands, and, above all, England. English War of the Roses The Hundred Years' War finally ground to a halt in 1453, but just a few years later, England was plunged into her most intense dynastic struggle, dubbed the '''War of the Roses (1455-1487 AD). The loss of all England's continental lands except Calais, and the taxes needed to fight the war, meant the country was disheartened and angry. The question of legitimacy, that had lain dormant in England since Henry IV Lancaster usurped the throne in 1399, came to the fore during the ineffectual reign of King Henry VI Lancaster (1421-1471 AD). The War of the Roses takes its name from the badges worn by the followers of the two sides, both branches of the royal family descended from Edward III Plantagenet (1327-77). The House of York, descended through intermarriage from Edward's second son, had long been known by the sign of the white rose. The ruling House of Lancaster, descended from his third son, adopted the red rose as a contrasting symbol during the war between the two sides. His grandfather and father had been formidable men, but Henry VI was a weak, pious and scholarly young man; he founded Eton College in Windsor and King's College in Cambridge. His reign was dominated by his Lancastrian and Yorkist relatives constantly jockeying to grasp after power, until Henry married the ambitious Margaret of Anjou (d. 1482). Queen Margaret distrusted the Yorkist faction since they had a legitimate claim to the English throne, and formed an alliance with the Lancastrian. Duke Richard of York (d. 1460), the head of the Yorkists, was sent to Ireland where he could not play any role in the proceedings of the court, and the Lancastrian became increasingly corrupt. Things came to a head in the summer of 1453, when Henry VI experienced a mental breakdown, apparently on hearing the news from France of the defeat the Battle of Castillon. This was the first of recurring bouts of mental instability, possible inherited from his maternal grandfather [[Crisis of the Late Middle Ages#Build-up to the Final Phase .281377-1415.29|Charles VI "the Mad" of France]]. With the king incapacitated, parliament recalled his cousin Richard of York, and appointed him regent. During the regency, Richard clashed with the queen who saw him as a threat to the succession of her own infant son, Prince Edward (d. 1471), and he was again forced out of court as soon as Henry recovered his wits 16 months later. With the excessive corruption of the Lancastrian regime and the queen actively conspiring against him, Richard of York resorted to deposing the Lancastrians by armed force. Many disaffected nobles rallying to his cause. The first significant clashes of the sporadic civil war came St. Albans (May 1455), and then again at Northampton (July 1460). On each occasion the king's armies were defeated, and, after Northampton, Henry VI himself was captured by the Yorkists. In October, Parliament agreed a compromise where Henry VI remained as king but recognised York as his successor, disinheriting Henry's own son. A chaotic few months ensued. Richard of York was defeated and killed at the Battle of Wakefield (December 1460) by the Lancastrians. However, his eldest son, Edward, regrouped the Yorkist forces, marched north, and won a crushing victory at the Battle of Towton (1461); probably the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Queen Margaret and Prince Edward fled to Scotland, and the first phase of the civil war was over. In the aftermath, Edward had himself proclaimed King Edward IV York (1461-83). Edward's early reign was concerned with putting down pockets of Lancastrian resistance. However his main problem lay in his own Yorkist faction. His chief supporter, the powerful Duke Richard of Warwick (d. 1471), fancied he could control the new king, and began arranging for his marriage to a daughter of King Louis XI of France, seeking to secure his throne. Warwick was humiliated and enraged when Edward instead married a minor English noblewoman. Deeming Edward was far too ignorant of politics, Warwick defected to the Lancastrian faction, forming an alliance with Queen Margaret, Prince Edward, and the French king. In September 1470, he invaded England, deposed Edward IV, recovered the mad king Henry VI from the Tower of London, and restored him to the throne. This time, Edward was forced to flee to Flanders, accompanied by his younger brother Duke Richard of Gloucester (d. 1485). However, Edward returned to England six months later with a relatively small force provided by his brother-in-law Duke Charles of Burgundy. Many nobles still supported him and rallying to his cause. He defeated and killed Warwick at the Battle of Barnet (April 1471) and then defeated the remaining Lancastrian forces at the Battle of Tewkesbury (May 1471) where now 17-year-old Prince Edward was also killed. Mad king Henry VI was again imprisoned in the Tower of London, and his death was announced days later, almost certainly murdered. Now essentially the whole male line of the House of Lancaster was extinct, , and again the civil war seemed to be over. The second part of Edward's reign was a period of relative peace and stability, and he was popular; his personal resources from the duchy of York were considerable and he levied few taxes. Edward IV unexpectedly died in 1483 at the age of just 40; worn-out it was said. He left his two sons, Edward V York (April-June 1483) and Richard, under the regency of his younger brother, Duke Richard of Gloucester, the future King Richard III York (1483-1485). Richard III is one of the most debated figures in English history. In order to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne, a vast Tudor propaganda campaign painted him as a freakishly deformed Machiavellian villain who ruthlessly murdered to claw his way to power, as most famously portrayed in the play by William Shakespeare. We will probably never know the truth, and can only judge him by his actions. Until the death of Edward IV, Richard had been well-respected, his elder brother's staunchest supporter, a skill military commander, and an able administrator of his vast estates; according to contemporary reports his spinal deformity was barely noticeable. After his brother's death, Richard moved quickly to secure control of the young king and his brother, away from their guardian, Queen Margaret's brother; a popular move since the Queen's family were universally loathed. They were to reside in the Tower of London, which hadn't yet acquired the sinister reputation it gained in the Tudor age. The famous Princes in the Tower were never seen in public again''. Richard then announced that all the children of Edward IV were illegitimate, and was crowned King Richard III in July at Westminster Abbey. Rumours quickly circulated that the boys had been murdered on Richard's orders; almost certainly true. We will probably never know exactly why Richard III seized the throne. Was Richard motivated by poisonous personal ambition? There some patchy evidence that Edward IV's marriage was invalid therefore the princes actually were bastards, was he doing what he considered his duty? Any minority regency was precarious, even that of William the Conqueror, in these troubled times was he motivated by self-defence? 15th-century politics was a brutal business - kings were killed in battle, imprisoned, or killed by a red-hot poke in the case of Edward III - did he just accept that you had to be tough to survive? Whatever the truth, Richard presented himself as a reformer but his reign was too short to judge. With his position on the throne precarious, he inevitably surrounded himself with his loyalest supporters, resulting in no shortage of disaffected nobles ready to believe he was a usurper. Opposition to Richard coalesced around the last hope of the House of Lancaster, Henry Tudor (d. 1509). His connections to the royal family were extremely tenuous. The only thing that made him stand-out was the fact both his parents were cousins of the Lancastrian line; his father was the illegitimate son of Henry V's widow and a Welsh noble, while his mother was also illegitimate via a mistress of John of Gaunt, but declared legitimate by parliament though barred from succession. There were certainly Portuguese and Spanish princes with more legitimate claims. Henry Tudor had lived most of his life in exile in France, but landed at Milford Haven in Wales in early August 1485 with a small force of mainly French mercenaries. He gathered an eclectic group to his cause, both from the Lancastrian faction and through his own Welsh ancestry. Henry was well-aware that his best hope was to engage Richard quickly. Just three weeks later on Saturday 22 August 1485, a single battle betweenbarely 20,000 men changed the course of English history, the '''Battle of Bosworth Field' (August 1485). Richard had the high ground and almost twice as many men, and a cautious approach would have surely allowed his superior numbers to wind the day. But his forces were racked by intrigue, while Henry Tudor's were all declared rebels; a third force under Lord Stanley had not yet declared for either side. Perhaps it was the faltering of his initial attack or maybe the insubordination of one of his commanders, that prompted Richard into an act of recklessness. On noticing that Henry Tudor's party had become detached from the main body of the army, Richard gambled everything on a cavalry charge. But his horse was cut from under him and the charge faltered. With the battle turning against Richard, Stanley at last committed himself, on Henry Tudor's side. Richard III died in the melee after losing his helmet; even his bitterest enemy never questions his courage. The remains of Richard III were finally found under a city council car park in Leicester in 2012, thanks to the efforts of the Richard III Society, a group dedicated to altering his posthumous reputation; the skeleton had eleven wounds, eight of them to the skull. Henry Tudor was the last king to win the English crown on the field of battle. The War of the Roses was indeed over, though doubtless few Englishmen believed Henry VII Tudor (1485-1509) would survive long. Henry nevertheless proved himself a master of statecraft, and restored the power and stability of the English monarchy with exemplary thoroughness. His first task was to deal with the question of legitimacy, so he married the eldest daughter of Edward IV York, Elizabeth of York, descended directly from William the Conqueror. Their first son Arthur, born in September 1486, was the indisputable heir to the throne, at least providing Elizabeth herself was legitimate. Richard III had arranged for all of Edward's children to be declared illegitimate by parliament. All documents related to Edward IV's invalid marriage were destroyed so efficiently that to this day only one copy of the act of parliament has ever been found. Almost incidentally, Henry and Elizabeth's marriage also united the warring houses of York and Lancaster, symbolised by the Tudor rose, combining in harmony the white and red roses under the new Tudor Dynasty (1485-1603). Nevertheless, like Henry IV Lancaster almost a century earlier, Henry VII had undoubtedly usurped the throne and his reign was plagued by attempts to unseat him. This time they took an unusual form. They were headed by pretenders, nonentities who were coached by the rebels to impersonate princes who would have a real claim to the throne, one in 1487 and another in 1491. It was a measure of the vigour and popularity of the new Tudor monarchy that Henry prevailed on both occasions, and the rest of his reign was relatively peaceful. Caution and common-sense characterised his reign, both in domestic and foreign affairs. At home, Henry's reign began the gradual transformation of England towards the centralised Tudor state; helped by a widespread desire to avoid a return to the anarchy of the preceding decades. In restoring order after the civil wars, his principal weapon was the Court of Star Chambre, revived from earlier practice; intended to cut-through the cumbersome legal system and act swiftly, it would become synonymous with political and social oppression. Henry also refilled the depleted royal treasury by efficient tax collection and sometimes ruthless confiscations. He recognised that the crown must be able to display both splendour and power when occasion required, but otherwise strictly controlled expenditure. One of his few extravagance was commissioning Venetian explorer John Cabot to cross the Atlantic in 1497, the first step towards English colonial expansion, but his journey provided no lasting result. In foreign affairs, Henry favoured peace and trade, for import and export taxes were an important part of royal revenue. There was a brief period of hostilities with France over Brittany and their support of pretenders, but he made peace in 1492 on terms that opened-up trade between the two countries. After a stand-off with the Flemish merchants, he agreed an important commercial treaty with Flanders in 1496, that had long lasting benefits to all of the British economy. He also secured a peace treaty with Scotland in 1502; the first treaty between England and Scotland for almost two centuries. The Scottish treaty was followed by the marriage in 1503 of his daughter Margaret to James IV Stewart of Scotland (d. 1513); linking the Tudor and Stewart lines eventually culminated in James I Stuart of England, thus uniting the crowns of the two kingdoms. Meanwhile, Henry was one of the first monarchs to recognise that Spain, united under the joint rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, was a new power to be reckoned with. He secured a marriage between his eldest son Arthur and the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon in 1501. But less than a year later 15-year-old Arthur died of a sudden illness, leaving Catherine a widow. Papal dispensation was Immediately sought for the Spanish princess to marry the new heir to the throne, Henry's second son, the future Henry VIII Tudor. By his death in 1509, Henry VII left his heir a prosperous and stable kingdom, which Henry VIII inherits without any trace of disturbance or unrest. Rise of the House of Habsburgs After 1254, the Holy Roman Empire lost any true political meaning, and the German electors granted the title of emperor to several different families. In 1273, their choice was Rudolf I Habsburg (1273-91). With hindsight, his election seems of great significance, because he was the first Habsburg on the imperial throne. But the Habsburg monopoly on the succession still remained far in the future. The House took its name from Habsburg Castle or "Hawk's Castle", a fortress built in the 1020s overlooking the river Aar to the west of Zürich, in what is now Switzerland. Few medieval families played the game of feudal dynastic marriages better than the House of Habsburg. Two centuries later, Rudolf I Habsburg was the count of quite modest regions in the Alsace and Switzerland. His election as Holy Roman Emperor was a slightly surprising choice, but he was a powerful leader, a German, and well-positioned to deal with a major encroachment on German territory. For several generations, the Duchy of Bohemia (the modern day Czech Republic) was a somewhat contentious part of imperial Germany, because the ruling dynasty was Slav rather than German. In 1251, the ambitious Ottokar II of Bohemia greatly extended his realm, acquiring the neighbouring Duchy of Austria by marrying the widow of the last duke. Emperor Rudolf first approached his task by legal means, questioning Ottokar's claim to Austria and summoning him to an imperial diet as his feudal overlord. When Ottokar refused to appear, Rudolf used this as pretext to enter Austria with an imperial army in 1276. The war culminated in the Battle on the Marchfeld (August 1278), where Ottokar was defeated and killed. Austria thus passed to the House of Habsburg, which remained the heart of what would become the mighty Habsburg Empire for over six centuries, until 1918. The subsequent two centuries brought some humiliating setbacks for the Habsburgs, including the loss of their homeland. The emerging Swiss Confederation fought them on numerous occasions, successfully creating the basis for greater autonomy and much later her independence in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). At the same time, the Habsburgs consolidated their position in Austria, founding the University of Vienna in in 1365 and building St. Stephen's Cathedral in 1359, one of the city's most recognisable landmarks. A series of Habsburg marriages between 1477 and 1515 gave rise to a much quoted phrase, "Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry". The age of the convenient wedding began in earnest with Maximilian I Habsburg (d. 1519). His father was the second Habsburg to be elected emperor, Frederick III Habsburg (1440-1493). From 1473, secret negotiations were undertaken between Frederick and the Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. The proposed bargain was that Charles' daughter, Mary, would marry Maximilian. In return the emperor would raise Burgundy from a duchy to a kingdom, thus securing her independence from King Louis XI of France. Unfortunately, the marriage occurred too late to prevent France effectively annexing Burgundy, although the Habsburgs did manage to defend and hold onto the Low Countries (modern day Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg); a very commercially and culturally prosperous region. However, this began a difficult relationship with France that would stick to the Habsburg shoe for centuries. On his father's death, Maximilian succeeded him as Emperor Maximilian I (1493-1519). The offspring of his marriage to Mary of Burgundy was the bridegroom in the next advantageous alliance. Maximilian arranged for his son Philip I (d. 1506) to marry Joan, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the powerful monarchs of a newly united Spain. The emperor was merely interested in an alliance against France, rather than to place a Habsburg on the Spanish throne; Joan was then fourth in the line of succession. Nevertheless, he lived to see that as the astonishing outcome of the wedding. Three unexpected deaths meant that by 1500, Joan was the heiress to the Spanish throne. In that same year, she gave birth to a son, the future Charles V (1516-56). Meanwhile, Maximilian’s skill as a matchmaker continued. In 1515, he betrothed his grandson, Ferdinand, to the daughter of the king of Bohemia and Hungary. When that male line died out at the Battle of Mohacs (1526) against the Turks, these two kingdoms would fall into Habsburg hands too. Maximilian himself died in 1519. His two grandsons Charles and Ferdinand ruled a very large slice of Europe. By this time, the prestige of the family was such that each also succeeded Maximilian in turn as Holy Roman Emperor, over a span of nearly half a century. The imperial crown became a Habsburg inheritance in succeeding generations, all the way down to its dissolution by Napoleon Bonaparte. Thus the mighty Habsburg Empire bestrode Europe as the most powerful dynasty of the 16th century. It had been assembled within one lifetime, that of Maximilian, and almost entirely through peaceful means. Fortunate Austria marries. France and the Italian Wars In the wake of the Hundred Years’ War and the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War, the trend was continued by Louis XI Valois (1461-83), son of Charles VII, towards the autocratic monarchy, that would characterise later centuries. He was helped by a widespread distaste for the destructive self-interest of the nobility. Louis was able for a variety of reasons to increase his power over all those he ruled, including his vassals. This was often because taxes, which before the war had been occasional, were increasingly accepted as regular and permanent, and at the decree of the king's privy council. Without the restraints that Magna Carta and parliament placed on English kings, the French parliament (Estates General) met less frequently and thus gradually lost its power. Also, with the appearance of professional armies and cannons, great nobles could no longer brave the challenges of their rulers from behind the walls of their castles. Medieval royal power which worked through vassals, gave way to one in which royal government was carried out by paid officials of a modern bureaucracy. Louis established an official postal system for government business in 1464, with the necessary relays of horses in permanent readiness; 70 years later it would be opened up for private mail for a payment. The return of peace bought steady growth of trade and prosperity, which Louis actively encouraged, such as beginning a great tradition of Lyons fairs in 1463. Louis was also able to eliminate his most troublesome vassals. He was able to see the downfall of the Duchy of Burgundy, the losing side in the civil war against his father, when Duke Charles the Bold (d. 1477) antagonised the Duke of Lorraine and Swiss Confederation, and met his end at the Battle of Nancy (1477). Burgundy thus reverted to the French crown, although Louis' ambitions were thwarted by Maximilian I Habsburg in affluent Flanders; the first of a long series of conflict between the great houses of Valois and Habsburg. He would also eventually bring ever-independent Brittany under direct royal control, through the marriage of his son to the heiress of the dukedom. That son, Charles VIII Valois (1483-98), inherited a kingdom fast recovering her prosperity and confidence, but would drain her resources away in a series of disastrous Italian campaigns to no good purpose. By the 15th century, Italy was dominated by five great powers. The Italian city-states of Milan, Florence, and Venice with her unquestioned hegemony over the Mediterranean. The Papal States. And the feudal Kingdom of Naples which had evolved from Norman southern Italy of the 12th century. None had the capacity defeat all the others. A balance of power was in the interests of all, allowing them to continue to enjoy the civilised pleasures of thriving commerce and the Renaissance. Venice and Milan were the first to recognise this, resolving their long-standing differences in the Treaty of Lodi (1454). Their example inspires others. Later in the same year Florence formed a defensive league with both Milan and Venice. Early in 1455, the Pope and the king of Naples joined an alliance in which all five pledge mutual non-aggression. The peace held for 40-years surprisingly considering Italy's past record of incessant warfare. But in 1494 the peace collapsed through old rivalries and series of succession crises, inviting foreign invasions and disaster on them all. Ludovico Sforza (d. 1508) emerged from a dynastic dispute in Milan, and in order to bolster his position, he allied himself with Charles VIII of France. However, he failed to understand that inviting powerful foreign rulers to intervene in local disputes was a dangerous game, since they invariably had their own agendas. At the same time, another dynastic dispute was ongoing since 1458 in the Kingdom of Naples. The French kings had an old claim to Naples dating back to the 13th-century, and Ludovico urged Charles VIII to press his claim. The young French king inherit none of his fathers shrewdness, and had romantic dreams of glory. He needed little encouragement to crossed the Alps with a massive army of 30,000 men in September 1494, and quickly seize Naples. However, the other great Italian powers were now scared of France, and formed an alliance against them. The Italian Wars (1494–1559) rapidly became a general struggle for power and territory, characterised by shifting alliances and counter-alliances among the great Italian powers, and foreign claimants from France, and the Habsburg Empire. It merged with the two great struggles of the age, the clash between Francis I of France and Charles V Habsburg, and between Christian and Ottoman Europe. For the next six decades, the country was the scene of almost ceaseless, bewildering, and inconclusive warfare, that wreaked widespread devastation on the Italian mainland: the hinterland of Venice was plundered in 1499 and 1509; Rome was sacked and looted in 1527; and the ten-month-long siege of Florence in 1529 brought ruin to its suburbs. The sophisticated commerce and industry of Italy virtually collapsed, just went the Age of Discovery was prompting the decline in Mediterranean trade upon which they had thrived. By the end of the wars, all the Italian city-states had lost their independence, except for Venice and Savoy. Tsarist Russia From the 12th-century onwards, Russia was more and more separated from Western Europe by her own traditions and special historical experience. Catholicism in the West was more uncompromising, and more unacceptable than ever to Eastern Orthodoy. Then there was the two-century domination of Russia by the Mongol Golden Horde. The Mongol armies mainly operated in the south, and gradually a new balance within Russia appeared; Novgorod and Moscow acquired new importance, eclipsing of Kiev. The Horde’s control over its subjects was indirect, using local princes, who had to go to the Horde's capital at Sarai on the Volga, and make their separate arrangements with their conquerors. One of the most willing "collaborators" was the Prince Alexander Nevsky (d. 1263), who became in 1252, with Mongol support, the Grand Prince of Moscow. Alexander's descendants followed his somewhat degrading policy of cooperation with their Mongol overlords, and gradually Moscow emerged as the focus of a new centralising trend. The main task of vassals was the collection of large amounts of tax, and the Mongols found them efficient tax-gatherers. They were able to limit Mongol interference in their own domains, and readily accepted the assignment as tax collector from lesser Russian principalities often by force. The struggle to survive meanwhile favoured those rulers who were most despotic, thus the future political tradition of Russia was shaped. Thus Moscow built-up an unprecedented position of strength among the Russians, which was given extra validity when the archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church transfers his residence there in 1326. By the reign of Grand Princes Dmitry Donskoy (1359-89), Moscow at last felt in a position to challenge the Mongols. He gathers a vast army from all the Russian principalities, and won a crushing victory over a Mongol army at the Battle of Kulikovo (September 1380). The Mongols crushed this uprising in a three-year campaign, but it established Moscow incontrovertibly as the leading power among the Russian principalities. B the Golden Horde was losing territory to another great Mongol conqueror in the style of Genghis Khan, Timur (d. 1405). Sensing an opportunity, the Prince of Moscow gathered a vast army from all the Russian principalities, and won a rare victory over a Mongol army at the Battle of Kulikovo (September 1380). This did little to end the Mongol dominance of the region, and indeed they retaliated just two years later by sacking Moscow. Yet it did establish Moscow incontrovertibly as the leading power among the Russians. The Princes of Moscow were now sometimes describing themselves as "of Moscow and all Russia". That became more than an empty boast during the reign of Ivan the Great (1462-1505 AD), who succeeded to the throne at the age of twenty-two. He was determined to liberate all the Russian lands from the Mongol yoke, and instead bring them under Moscow's dominance. His first took the field in 1470 against Moscow's biggest rival, the rich commercial Russian city of Novgorod. Finally in 1478, the long-standing independence of the city was brought to an abrupt end. With this important step, in 1480 the Grand Prince of Moscow refused to pay the annual tribute of tax to the Golden Horde for the first time in more than two-hundred years. The Mongol Khan prepared to march against Moscow, but the Horde was already in the process of disintegrating into several smaller khanates, and in the end withdrew without a fight. This important symbolic moment enabled Ivan the Great to present himself internationally as the free sovereign of an independent state. Meanwhile, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 presented another glittering opportunity, that Ivan and his descendants made much of. Many Byzantine scholars, artisans, and masons fled to their fellow Orthodox Christians of Moscow, and Ivan used them for a complete renovation of his Moscow fortress, to celebrate his successes. Next to the Kremlin, traders and artisans set up shop in Kitay Gorod, which became the cultural and commercial heart of Moscow. There also developed the concept of the Third Rome: Rome itself had fallen to the Western barbarians and Catholic heresy; and Constantinople was in the hands of Ottoman Turks. Thus the third, Moscow, became the centre of the Orthodox Christian world. The theory was reinforced by Ivan’s marriage to the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI. Under Ivan’s grandson, Ivan the Terrible, the Russians began to call their monarch Tsar; derived from Caesar. By the end of his reign, Ivan the Great had gathered all the Russian lands under Moscow’s control, from the White Sea in the north almost as far south as Kiev, and laid the foundations of the Russian nation. The dim embers of Russia’s later animosity with the West can ever be seen, in the longstanding hostility between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Throughout her history Russia would periodically embrace and learn from Europe (such as under Peter the Great), only to inevitably recoil from the West. Poland-Lithuania High Renaissance The artistic flower of the early Renaissance, burst into full bloom during the High Renaissance (1490-1527). Artists no longer pondered the art of antiquity, they now had the confidence to go their own way, secure in the knowledge that what they were doing was as good, if not better, than anything that had been done before. Rome would be sacked in 1527 during the Italian Wars, marking the end of this extraordinary era. While there were many dozens of outstanding Renaissance artists, the period is inexorably linked with three masters of unparalleled talent: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael (Raffaello) Sanzio. Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452) epitomised the Renaissance ideal. He was trained as a painter in Florence, becoming a member of the painters' guild in 1472. Yet, painting was just one of his areas of interest. His famous notebooks show his feverish mind working on ideas for sculptures, architecture, engineering, science, music, mathematics, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, history, cartography, and especially inventions. Leonardo was ahead of his time in many of the notions he dreamed up: parachutes, helicopters, and tanks were useless until there was an engine to propel them. His paintings would in themselves rank him among the world's greatest artists, though few survived for Italy was consumed by war throughout his working life. Little remains of his two most ambitious projects, a large mural in Milan and another in Florence. In The Last Supper, Leonardo was a pioneer in his treatment of the human drama between Jesus and the apostles. The Mona Lisa introduced Leonardo's smoky style, a subtlety in the use of paint and the treatment of light, which added a new technique to the painter's repertoire. She smiles at the viewer, with her hands folded demurely in front of her, with a deliciously mysterious gaze. She has been in France since 1517, when Francis I made the elderly Leonardo his court painter. The precocious genius Michelangelo (d. 1475) sculpted two of his best-known works before the age of thirty: the Pietà (1499), a sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding on her lap the dead Christ that still remains one of the most beautiful works of art in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City; and a marble statue of David (1504), presenting the biblical hero about 13 feet high as a naked youth standing with petulant confidence. In 1505, the pope summoned Michelangelo to Rome to provide a sculpted tomb for his own memorial. However, the project was doomed to remain unfinished, for the Pope had an even more challenging task for this multi-talented artist. In 1508 Michelangelo, despite holding a low opinion of painting, was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12). These vast panels along the centre of the ceiling tell the story of Genesis, from God's creation of the universe, to the spark of life, and on through the expulsion from Eden, to the human frailty in the drunkenness of Noah. The effect of the Sistine ceiling is exuberant and optimistic, reflecting its times. In contrast, Michelangelo’s altar wall depicting the Last Judgement, commissioned after the sack of Rome in 1527, is a dark and dramatic work. As well as a sculpture and painter, Michelangelo was frequently commissioned as an architect. His first major architectural project was a commemorative chapel for the Medici family in Florence designed from 1520. At the Laurentian Library, he pioneered the Mannerist style which dominated architectures in Italy until about 1580, when the Baroque style began to replace it. To add to his other distinctions, about 250 of Michelangelo’s poems survive, which subsequently won him a reputation among Italy's leading poets. While Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, just a few hundred yards away Raphael (b. 1483) was working on another commission from the pope. Something of a boy genius, news of Raphael's talent must have spread rapidly for him to be summoned to Rome and given a papal commission at the age of twenty-six. It occupied him for the rest of his life. The pope wanted frescoes for a series of rooms in the Vatican. In the Stanze, Raphael triumphed over the obstacles of vaulted rooms, with walls interrupted by doors or alcoves. The frescos involve large numbers of characters, requiring compositional skills similar to those of a director presenting a scene on a stage. The most well known are the School of Athens, featuring Plato, Aristotle and many others, and the Disputa in which biblical figures and saints discuss the Christian sacrament. Raphael died at thirty-seven and his career spanned just sixteen years, but in that time he designed tapestries to hang around the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel, became a formidable portrait artist, and spent five years as the architect of the new St Peter's. The six decades of almost ceaseless and inconclusive warfare in Italy, gradually sapped the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and the wealth of the patrons who supported its artist. By 1550, it had been replaced with a more somber less innovative outlook. Yet the changes wrought by the Italian Renaissance proved irreversible and spread to other parts of Europe. The outstanding figures of the later Renaissance outside Italy were the German Albrecht Dürer (b. 1471), and the Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch (b. 1450). Dürer's achievement was enhanced by his originality in many differing fields of art; engravings, altarpieces, portraits, watercolours, and books. Bosch's work was collected within his lifetime in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and was widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell. The Renaissance thus merged into a variety of loosely related cultural movements: the philosophical work of Erasmus (b. 1466) and Thomas More (b. 1478); the English playwrights William Shakespeare (b. 1564) and Christopher Marlowe (b. 1564); the emergence of ballet in the French court; and the Scientific Revolution. Printing Press (1455) The printing press is often cited as one of the greatest invention in the history of mankind. The early innovations in printing were the striking achievement of Buddhists in China and Korea. The world's earliest known woodblock printed document is a short religious texts printed on a single sheet of paper in Korea in about 750. The earliest known book, a 16 feet long scroll known as the Diamond Sutra, can be even more precisely dated to 868, for the details of the publication were given at the end of the text. The high quality of the printing suggests it must have had many predecessors. From the 11th-century, the Chinese were experimenting with manual movable type printing, but the Chinese script posed significant challenges, and it wasn’t until the early 13th-century that the Koreans finally achieved it; the oldest surviving printed book dates from 1377. Nevertheless, the crucial final step of the printing process was a European innovation; Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press. The life of Gutenburg (b. 1400) is obscure; what we know of him, we learn from the failure of his business career. Originally a goldsmith from the tiny German duchy of Mainz, Gutenburg seems to have begun experimenting with a printing press by the 1430s. In 1439, he was being sued by his business partners in Strasbourg. The transcript of the trial, which he lost, describes a press and a supply of metal type. By 1450, he was back in Mainz where he borrowed 1600 guilders from a businessman, Johann Fust, with his printing equipment as security. By the time the first Gutenburg Bible was published in 1456, Gutenburg had again been sued, and the business had been taken over by Fust. Nevertheless, Gutenberg's achievements were eventually recognised in 1465, when the archbishop of Mainz granted him a title and an annual stipend. The printing process involves complex problems at every stage: arranging the individual letters, aligned and well spaced, in a form which will hold them firm and level to transfer the ink evenly to the paper, though applying a rapid but steady downward pressure. Gutenburg's new technology, so brilliantly launched, spreads rapidly: there were printing presses in the Papal State by 1464; Switzerland by 1465; Venice and Paris by 1470; Spain and Belgium by 1474; London in 1476; in Sweden by 1483; and as far away as Spanish Mexico City by 1539. The printing press allowed for the mass production of inexpensive printed books; by 1500, the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced some twenty million books. It played a key role in the rapid dissemination of knowledge that led to the Scientific Revolution, a rise in literacy, the spread of learning to the masses, and the modern knowledge-based economy. The revolutionary potential of printing would soon be felt in the Protestant Reformation. Although China and Korea achieved all the early innovations in printing, they were denied these benefits, only acquiring the printing press in 1833 imported from Europe. Category:Historical Periods